3 “Go” Tips for a Successful Onboarding Process

Here we are already nearing the end of the first month of 2018, as time keeps ticking on. As people begin to drop their new year’s resolutions, there are some things that are a matter of survival for HR professionals, leaving them no option but to carry on with their goals and demands. No matter the year, the fine folks in HR are always working to recruit, train, engage, and retain a workforce that can bring a company to profitability.

The effectiveness of your onboarding process is the key component in both the retention and productivity of your new hires. Too often, onboarding can be confused with orientation, as a way to fill out paperwork and introduce your new employees to their new job. In fact, effective onboarding creates an encompassing sphere of communication that provides education, on-the-job training, direction, a space for communication, and the ultimate ability to empower your employees.

Here are 3 “Go” tips for a successful onboarding process:

Go Digital

Finding a cloud-based solution to your onboarding process is more than just saving trees. Here are 3 elements that digital onboarding can bring:

Automation:

You can harness an army of intelligent software robots to automate many tasks to enable consistent and efficient management of your onboarding processes. This allows you to deploy your staff to handle human tasks requiring intuition, creativity, and adaptability.

Engagement:

You can devise a holistic approach to onboarding involving the whole organization with centralized information key to each team member’s role. This allows you to focus on communication and experience with a well orchestrated process from placement to first day and beyond.

Measurement:

Digital solutions allow you to leverage predictive analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of your onboarding program. They connect the dots between various statistics including recruiting effort, tenure, time-to-proficiency, and revenue-per-employee and assign real value to your processes.

Go Long

In a 2015 Equifax study, it was found that over half of people who left a job in the last year did so in the first year of their position. The bulk of those leave within the first six months. HR professionals know how costly turnover is, yet only 37% of employers extend onboarding activities past a month, tapering off to just 15% at six months. When onboarding is viewed as a process, and not just an orientation, it allows for the streams of communication to develop that are required for an employee and the company to have a successful tenure. Extending the onboarding process gives both the employee and company the opportunity to effectively deal with challenges, as well as make sure that everyone is on the same page of what the employee needs to achieve engagement and full productivity.

Go Back

This will sound so simple, but it is one of the pillars of your onboarding process: Go back and get feedback from your new hires on their onboarding experience. This isn’t just about a business process, this is ultimately about a wellness of life for your employees. Just like anything, you have to constantly be evolving and growing, and it’s no different in your onboarding process. Find the weaknesses, find the strengths, and keep working to develop the most powerful process for your employees and company. The onboarding process not only immerses a new employee into the culture, it also says wonders about how a company views their employees. Getting real feedback will only help you design a program going forward that meets your employees on both a professional and personal level.

Your onboarding process is the gateway to effectively developing great staff and a great company. While of course there are many things to consider in your onboarding, these 3 simple “Go” tips can help you cycle through the evolutions of your process that allow you to unleash the power of your people.

David LaMontagne is the Manager of Core Technology at Essium, a premiere software company that has developed an army of intelligent software robots to automate many tasks to enable consistent and efficient management of your onboarding processes with their compliance platform named PRYDE. Designed to give HR personnel a STRESS-FREE onboarding experience, PRYDE helps assimilate new employees and retain personnel long-term.